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Pérez Art Museum Miami Announces Inaugural Exhibition Schedule

Miami—March 4, 2013—Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) today announced the inaugural exhibition lineup for its new building, opening in Museum Park in December 2013. The wide-ranging roster of exhibitions examines the interpretation and appropriation of cultural and political identities, economic structures, and commodities generated by Miami’s diverse population and its position as a cross-cultural hub.

The selection and presentation of artists, collections, and commissioned projects for PAMM is guided by the Museum’s mission to create dialogues across and through local, regional, and international contexts and to emphasize artists and projects that engage with traditions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The curatorial program is also particularly attuned to the work of local artists and designers.

From focused exhibitions on the work of Cuban painter Amelia Peláez and Haitian born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié to thematic presentations of the Museum’s permanent collection to major retrospectives on artists Ai Weiwei and Beatriz Milhazes and group exhibitions on the exchange of ideas between the Caribbean basin, Europe, and North Africa, PAMM’s upcoming projects serve as critical frames through which larger dialogues about recent history, migration, new cultural formations, and diverse ideologies can be structured.

AMERICANADecember 4, 2013 – May 2015

Pérez Art Museum Miami began to acquire international modern and contemporary art in 1996. The need for expanded spaces to store, conserve, and display the growing collection was a principal driver in the creation of this new PAMM facility. The museum features six large galleries conceived for permanent collection displays. These “overview galleries” run from the first through the second floors forming a spine that joins the remaining ten changing exhibition and project spaces.

To inaugurate these overview galleries, PAMM has brought together key loans and recent gifts from some of Miami’s most significant private collectors with highlights from its own young collection to create a two-year cycle of changing thematic installations collectively titled AMERICANA. An English and Spanish word that broadly describes images and objects produced in the Americas and typical of American cultures, here it is specifically intended to evoke both North American vernacular art collecting traditions and a unique hemispheric perspective that reaches across national borders.

In this first exhibition cycle, AMERICANA includes art produced in South America, North America, and the Caribbean presented in the form of six short visual essays, each offering a critical perspective on a set of related issues in modern culture and society of particular interest to progressive artists. These thematic presentations—Desiring Landscape, Sources of the Self, Formalizing Craft, Progressive Forms, Corporal Violence, and Commodity Cultures—are not organized chronologically but rather juxtapose works from a range of pivotal historical moments since the late 1930s.

The second cycle of AMERICANA exhibitions will debut during the summer of 2014, and treats artistic preoccupations of the post-modern era in the thematic presentations Abstracting Identity, Performing the Museum, Commemorative Acts, Street Scene, Forms of Participation, and Global Positioning Systems.

Ai Weiwei: According to What?

December 4, 2013 – March 16, 2014

Ai Weiwei: According to What? is the first major international survey of this vital artist’s multifaceted artistic oeuvre. This exhibition reveals Ai’s practice as emerging from an ever-questioning dialogue with the social, political and cultural positions of his native China and the world at large. Ai (b. 1957) works in a range of media, including architecture and design, and this exhibition will feature work of the last 20 years, including photography and the large-scale sculptures for which the artist is best known. These sculptures, often made from modified found objects, suggest the irreverent nature of Ai’s project and reconfigure materials in new and evocative ways. With a broad formal range, Ai has continuously challenged possible meanings and modes of art making, most recently employing the Internet and its global reach as a platform for activism and expression. His provocative and beautiful works of art and architecture are an exploration of the transformative potential of contemporary art, which he said is “not a form but a philosophy of society.”

Image Search: Photography from the Collection

December 4, 2013 – July 27, 2014This exhibition presents a varied selection of photographs drawn from the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami, with a particular emphasis on the Cowles Collection, a gift of more than one hundred iconic works of the 20th century including photographs by Edward Steichen, Andy Warhol and Rineke Dijkstra. Relying on contemporary strategies for organizing and understanding information, the exhibition will incorporate sequential and salon-style hangs in its installation. Within this format, new modes of visual literacy— created by the ever-growing influence of digital media and the way in which images circulate and are indexed through the Internet and by a continued interest in the form of the archive—are brought to bear on the Museum’s strong and expanding collection of photography. Allowing the viewer to see the works through visual cues and historical connections, looking at the image within the photograph as well as relationships between photographs, this exhibition seeks to engender new ‘ways of looking.’

This show will employ digital didactic labels and text on iPads as part of PAMM’s growing engagement with technology and new platforms for education in the galleries.

A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry

December 4, 2013 – May 25, 2014

Pérez Art Museum Miami will present an extensive selection of works from the Miami-based collection of Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Founded in 1979, this "archive of archives" initially focused on concrete and visual poetry—including rare manuscripts and published works by international luminaries such as Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Oyvind Fahlström and Eugen Gomringer. The collection subsequently grew to encompass a broad array of historic and contemporary works that synthesize word and image. Rooted in the early to mid-20th-century European avant-garde, the collection provides a unique lens through which to examine the foundational movements of modernism, including Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada and Lettrisme, among others. The Sackners’ contemporary holdings are also expansive, with special strengths in artists' books and "assemblings" (limited-edition groupings of materials by numerous contributors), as well as various subgenres such as typewriter art, performance poetry, and micrography (abstract or representational designs comprised of minuscule lettering). The exhibition begins with a rare, 1897 publication of "Un Coup de des" (A Throw of the Dice), by Stéphane Mallarmé, which is considered one of the first true examples of concrete poetry, and it includes hundreds of objects spanning more than a century of creative expression.

A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Curator René Morales.

Pérez Art Museum Miami will present a focused selection of works by Amelia Peláez del Casal (b. 1896 – d. 1968), one of the most important Cuban painters of the modernist era. Alongside artists such as Carlos Enríquez, Wifredo Lam, Victor Manuel and Fidelio Ponce de León, Peláez personifies the primera vanguardia—the first wave of Cuban artists who traveled to Europe before World War II, where they were exposed to Cubism, Surrealism and other contemporaneous styles. When these artists subsequently returned to the island nation, they introduced the artistic innovations they had adopted abroad and transformed them by incorporating aspects of their native cultural and national identities.

Peláez is best known for brightly colored, quasi-abstract compositions that feature decorative objects and ornamental architectural motifs, evoking the traditional domestic interiors of Havana. This exhibition will take a socio-historical approach, examining Peláez’s work in the context of the changing material culture and urban landscape of Havana during the first half of the 20th century.

Project Gallery:Yael Bartana

December 4, 2013 – April 20, 2014

Among the most celebrated artists of her generation, Yael Bartana (b.1970) lives in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv and Berlin. Her early video work, both documentary and staged, explores social phenomena that illuminate the complexity of contemporary life, particularly within her native country of Israel. Bartana’s newest work, Inferno (2013) will have its debut at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). This work emerges from a residency in Brazil that is part of a larger, research-based project curated by Eyal Danon and Benjamin Seroussi focusing on new religious movements. Considering the rise of Evangelism and Neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil, as well as their connections to the ‘Holy Land’ and Judaic traditions and history, Bartana researched and shot an elaborate, three-part film in São Paulo during the first half of 2013.

The starting point of Inferno is the current construction of the third Temple of Solomon (Templo de Salmão) in São Paulo by a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal Church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), founded in Rio de Janeiro in the late-1970s with millions of adherents in Brazil and internationally. Built to biblical specifications, this new temple will be a replica of the first temple in Jerusalem, the violent destruction of which signaled the diaspora of the Jewish people in the 6th century BCE. Inferno confronts this conflation of place, history, and belief, providing insight into the complex realities of Latin America that have given rise to the temple project. Shot and edited with stylistic references to Hollywood action epics, Bartana’s film employs what she refers to as “historical preenactment,” a methodology that commingles fact and fiction, prophesy and history. Her work addresses the grandiose temple project through a vision of its future: Does its construction necessarily foreshadow its destruction? Using a powerful cinematic language, Inferno collapses histories of antiquity in the Middle East with a surreal present unfolding halfway around the world.

This project is commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the 19th Biennale of Sydney, and organized by PAMM Associate Curator Diana Nawi. This film was conceived as part of a research project initiated by Eyal Danon and Benjamin Seroussi. This film is made possible by Contemporary Art Partners, New York, and Petzel Gallery, New York. Support is provided by Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam. Additional support provided by the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; Centro da Cultura Judaica, São Paulo; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

The presentation of this work at PAMM is supported in part by the Consulate General of Israel.

Project Gallery: Hew Locke

December 4, 2013 – May 25, 2014

For Those in Peril on the Sea (2011) is an installation by Hew Locke (b. 1959), a British artist of Guyanese descent. It consists of dozens of scaled-down replicas of ships suspended from the ceiling, creating the impression of a massive exodus taking place throughout the architectural space above the viewer. It features a broad range of vessel types, from cigarette boats, catamarans and cruise liners to ragged fishing skiffs and timeworn cargo ships. In light of Miami’s history as the site for numerous waves of immigration—particularly from the Caribbean, and specifically by sea—For Those in Peril on the Sea will have a particular resonance for the Museum’s audiences. With its significant links to the South Florida community, this installation, part of Pérez Art Museum Miami’s permanent collection, promises a powerful initial experience for visitors to the new building.

This project was commissioned and organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) with additional support provided by Funding Arts Network.

Project Gallery:Monika Sosnowska

December 4, 2013 – September 28, 2014

Monika Sosnowska (b. 1972) is best known for large, site-specific sculptures made of steel, concrete, and other industrial materials. Though usually abstract, much of her work draws from the distinctive built environment of Warsaw, with its defunct or re-purposed Soviet-era buildings, its vast industrial zones, and its reconstructions of historic neighborhoods destroyed during World War II. Sosnowska’s project for Pérez Art Museum Miami makes dramatic use of the double-height Project Gallery for which it was commissioned.

Consisting of over 1,100 pounds of bent steel, the sculpture references the skeletal structures that are used as kiosks in Warsaw’s informal marketplaces. Often welded together from scrap metal by the same individuals who use them to sell their goods, these structures embody the kind of spontaneous, street-level commercial activity that contributes to a given city’s economic vitality and dynamism, despite its ambivalent status with respect to the official financial system. Although this activity generally unfolds beneath the radar of metropolitan authorities, the material residue that it leaves behind often changes the urban landscape in significant ways. Sosnowska’s sculpture transposes these social forces into the gallery space, amplifying and transforming them into a unified and impactful aesthetic encounter.

Project Gallery:Bouchra Khalili

December 4, 2013 – March 30, 2014

Bouchra Khalili (b.1975) investigates the experiences of identity, immigration, and transience. Working primarily in film and video, she reflects the nomadic and often transnational state of existence that defines life for many people throughout the world. Khalili uses a mode of poetic documentation to illuminate the lived realities of an increasingly mobilized world. Her newest work, commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami, is the third and final chapter of The Speeches Series. A video trilogy (2012-2013). Each of these incisive, unadorned works focuses on the act of speaking, featuring five individuals who give powerful, subjective accounts of their personal experiences amid larger political and economic spheres.

Khalili’s videos provide a vehicle through which her subjects deliver affecting speeches, expressing their own complex status within their adopted and native homelands in the language of their choice. Speeches - Chapter 1: Mother Tongue (2012) addresses language itself through a reinterpretation of famous political texts from history. Shot in Genoa, Italy, Speeches - Chapter 2: Words on Streets (2013), explores issues of citizenship, belonging, and nationalism through original manifestos written and presented by each subject. The last chapter of The Speeches Series, which will debut at PAMM, was produced in New York and focuses on undocumented immigrants who live and work in the city. These subjects reveal the political consciousness inherent to their clandestine lives and labor, creating a meaningful and urgent discourse on the contemporary, immigrant working class.

This project was commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and developed during a fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York. Additional support provided by the Bank of America Charitable Trust.

Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes is an exhibition project involving a series of new works generated over the past year by the Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (b. 1954). Known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions, Duval-Carrié is presenting a series of large-scale paintings and sculptures. Contrasting his signature use of strong colors, this project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific nineteenth-century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as William Heade and Frederick Church, were commissioned as part of Colonial interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination, and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World

April 18, 2014 – August 17, 2014

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World will highlight over two centuries of rarely seen works—from paintings and sculptures to prints, photographs, installations, films, and videos—dating from after the Haitian Revolution to the present. This exhibition employs an inter-disciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the Caribbean and its artistic heritage and contemporary practices. It focuses on four central themes: Fluid Motions, Counterpoints, Shades of History, and Kingdoms of this World. These interconnected frameworks allow insight into the complex context from which the vital and varied artistic production of the region has emerged, illuminating the multiple histories of the region.

With over 150 objects, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World features a range of diverse media depicting images of and about the region. Artists who have lived and worked in the Caribbean, as well as artists living abroad who responded to the rich visual tradition and history of the area are shown side-by-side. This exhibition mixes historical work by artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Camille Pissarro, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pélaez, and Armando Reverón, with works by contemporary artists, including Allora and Calzadilla, Janine Antoni, Renée Cox, and Ebony Patterson, among many others.

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World was originally organized by El Museo del Barrio in conjunction with the Queens Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, and was presented at the three institutions in 2012. This iteration of the exhibition was organized by guest curator Elvis Fuentes for the Pérez Art Museum Miami. It was coordinated by Associate Curator Diana Nawi, with Curatorial Assistant María Elena Ortiz.

This project has received funding through a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation.

Geoffrey Farmer

October 2, 2014 – February 22, 2015

Pérez Art Museum Miami is commissioning a new, large-scale installation by Vancouver-based artist, Geoffrey Farmer (b.1967). Farmer is best known for his work with collage and his references to the genre’s modernist traditions, such as those produced by Dada artists at the beginning of the 20th century. The artist has also created numerous theatrical installations involving odd combinations of found objects which he transforms into awkward, puppet-like figures. His recent sculptures and installations have included kinetic elements that are often choreographed with sound. These pieces become theater plays or small operas with uncanny objects as their main performers. Creating mysterious and, at times, sinister environments, the artist’s work responds dynamically to the architectural and cultural contexts in which it is produced.

Beatriz Milhazes. Jardim Botânico

September 19, 2014 – January 11, 2015

The first major U.S. retrospective on Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960), the exhibition will feature the artist’s large-scale abstract paintings inspired by Brazilian and European Modernism, Baroque forms, popular culture, and the decorations of Carnival. During the early 1990s, the artist developed an unusual painting technique, in which she adhered separate images executed in acrylic paint—such as flowers, arabesques, lace patterns or peace-signs—onto canvases in a style that references collage, graffiti, and plastic decals. This practice results in richly textured surfaces that appear prematurely aged. The exhibition will include works produced over the last 25 years of the artist’s career and examine their evolution from softer, more decorative forms to harder-edged abstraction.

Jasper Johns Prints

October 2, 2014 – February 2015

Best known for his radical take on painting beginning in the late-1950s, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has consistently pursued printmaking alongside his painting practice. This exhibition will bring together a rich selection of works representing Johns’ print oeuvre. Exploring motifs that have reappeared throughout his career, Jasper Johns Prints offers insight into his ongoing investigations of seriality, repetition, and indexing as well as his formal sensibility.

Adler Guerrier

October 30, 2014 – February 2015

Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier (b. 1975) works in a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, prints, and collaged works on paper. Guerrier’s practice investigates of the mutability of text and image and the variability of meaning. He is as interested in politics as he is in poetics, and his work explores the rich territory between them. Often using Miami as a physical site and an embodiment of realized (and unrealized) moments in American political and social history, Guerrier examines, repurposes, and sometimes fictionalizes the city through his work. Guerrier’s oeuvre is expansive in its engagement with the urban environment, art history and materials and this exhibition will bring together a selection of work from the last decade of his career alongside new work produced for this presentation.

In the Sculpture Garden

Jedd Novatt, Chaos Bizkaia & Chaos SASOngoing from December 4, 2013

By the early 1970s, works of minimalism had come to dominate the landscape of public sculpture in the United States. Characterized by reductive, geometric forms fabricated in raw industrial materials like Corten steel and aluminum, its ideal products represent an exploration of the essential nature of sculptural practice and experience, engaging viewers in a carefully organized phenomenology of volume, weight, mass and theatricalized viewing space.

For the last decade, Paris-based American artist Jedd Novatt has been employing and manipulating key minimalist visual and material tropes—the cube, unyielding medium, towering scale—in order to evolve the now long-stalled project beyond its traditional static and reflexive nature. Chaos Bizkaia (2012, bronze) and Chaos SAS (2013, stainless steel)—twisting, slipping, seemingly unstable stacks of monumental open rectangles—activate the lush tropical landscape of PAMM’s new sculpture garden with implied motion. As if arrested in a process of being formed from the primordial state of disorder to which the series title alludes, in a perpetual state of becoming, they inspire awe and impart grand emotions unfamiliar in the history of minimalism.

Jedd Novatt (b. 1958) has been represented in recent solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Sotheby's Beyond Limits at Chatsworth, UK (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013), the Lever House, New York (2013), Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio (2010), Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2009) and La Musee d’Art et d’Industrie, Roubaix, France (2008).

*Exhibition details subject to change.

About Pérez Art Museum Miami

​Pérez Art Museum Miami, opening in December 2013 in downtown Miami’s Museum Park, is focused on collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art that represents Miami’s cultural diversity, while providing progressive educational and community programming. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the cutting-edge facility will provide room to showcase growing collections, expanded exhibition space to bring more world-class exhibitions to Miami-Dade County and an educational complex. Pérez Art Museum Miami was originally founded as Center for Fine Arts, and was strictly an exhibiting organization with no collection of its own. In 1996, as part of an institution-wide reorganization, the museum was renamed Miami Art Museum and dedicated itself to collecting and exhibiting international art of the 20th and 21st centuries with a special emphasis on art of the Americas. In January 2011 work began on a cutting-edge building with generous spaces to showcase its art holdings and attract more top caliber exhibitions. The new facility will open in December 2013 as Pérez Art Museum Miami in recognition of a landmark leadership gift of now $40 million in cash and art.

Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Museum is sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; with the support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners. It is an accessible facility. For sign language interpretation or assistive listening devices please call Miami Art Museum’s education department 305.375.4073 at least five days in advance. Materials in accessible format may be requested. The Pérez Art Museum Miami building project is supported by the Building Better Communities Bond Program and the Mayor and Board of County Commissioners of Miami-Dade County.